Envision Greater Fond du Lac · https://www.envisiongreaterfdl.com/city-of-fond-du-lac/
Barred from returning after visiting his sick mother, a Wisconsin pastor leads his church from Guatemala by screen. His people miss his hugs, and they keep standing.
For though I am absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit, rejoicing and seeing your order, and the steadfastness of your faith in Christ.
Colossians 2:5
Just after 8 p.m. on Saturday, August 8, the people of Ven y Descansarás, a Pentecostal church in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, sat waiting for the sermon. Their pastor, the Rev. Esdras Paredes, was more than 2,000 miles away in Guatemala, and his internet connection was down. While the team worked on it, someone asked everyone to get up and greet each other. They waited 40 minutes.
Religion News Service and NPR told their story on September 29. Esdras flew to Guatemala in the summer of 2025 to see his mother, who was critically ill, and was told he could not come back until 2035. He has preached remotely up to three times a week ever since. He calls the church a family: "If you have a problem, we all have a problem." Francisco Martínez Javier, 38, started coming four years ago, after his 4-year-old son drowned. He says the pastor is "like my dad," and he misses hugging him.
Can you shepherd people you can't touch?
Much of the New Testament was written by pastors who couldn't get to their churches. Paul wrote to the believers in Colossae as a prisoner, and he signed off asking them to remember his chains (Colossians 4:18). Most of them had never met him; in verse 1 he writes to those who "have not seen my face in the flesh." Still he tells them he is with them in spirit, and what he does there is watch and be glad. He rejoices at their good order and their steady faith, a church holding together with him out of the room.
Fond du Lac looks like that now, though it isn't tidy, and the absence has a price. Esdras and his family lost $1,350 to a man posing as an immigration judge. To cover his costs, members worked past midnight one Friday in August making tamales to sell. His wife, the Rev. Wanda Paredes, now carries much of his work on top of her own. The day after the long wait, six people were baptized in cold, green water. Esdras prayed over each of them by cell phone, and his son Elias stood in the water and did the dunking his father had done a year before.
"I should be the one doing that," Esdras said. "They're my sheep." Paul would have understood both halves of that. The night the connection failed, the church filled the silence by turning to greet each other. That is the order an absent shepherd hopes to see: a flock that learned from him how to hold one another, and is still his.